A Reset

How You Reset Sandalwood Trees

You might have noticed that my posts in this blog haven’t been showing up as regularly as they had in the past. I haven’t been happy with the way that recent posts have turned out. I think I was beginning to wander into the tall weeds and lose the path of what I was trying to do with this blog. A presentation I did this last week told me that there was a way to get back on course. So this post will hopefully be the first step on that new path.

Since the 1970’s, I have tried to do three things:

Understand how complex systems (from individual people to natural systems and societies) change, evolve, and age.

Understand how to effectively disturb those complex systems so they support expanding autonomy and choice for our disability community

Develop this understanding into concepts and tools that advocates in our disability community can use to follow their own path and their community’s path to autonomy and free choice in their lives.

This last is the most difficult. People don’t have the time or interest for pursuing these areas of understanding, but we all have a stake in changing our world so it becomes a tool for fulfilling our lives and not a constantly expanding barrier to our growth and the realization of our dreams. I want to try to set the stage for how we might change our common future without making the framework of that “How” so complicated. That is what I will try to do in the posts that follow.

We all have grown up with a very simple model of how to solve problems. We see the problem as that which is bothering us or preventing us from realizing our goals, and we assume that the problem has a simple cause. Our solution is to change that simple cause in the most straightforward way.

This is solving problems as though they were breakdowns in a machine. We identify the broken part, remove it, and replace it with a new part. But most of the barriers to living full lives that we face are not broken parts in a machine. They are barriers that the system keeps recreating over and over again because they serve some purpose in the larger system. They preserve an organization’s power or they free up resources that the powerful can use for their own purposes, for example.

But, a lot of the time, the preservation of these barriers to our choice and autonomy are done out of mere convenience. It is easier to stop us from what we could become than it is to support us. This convenience, which is such a barrier to the change we need, is also an expression of how the larger system works. Some things are convenient and some things aren’t and this represents a pattern in how that large system works and the outcomes it supports.

And, such barriers also are also examples of how the system in which we live develops, ages, and, finally, breaks down. But that aging is so slow, we really don’t notice it until the aging begins to interfere more and more with our daily lives. Still, we try to treat these large scale system problems like aging as though they were no more than broken parts in the machinery of our lives, fixable in the same way that we would fix a car or a lawn mower.

The problem with treating these barriers in the same way we would repair our car is like tossing a small pebble into a large river. There is no question that the pebble will cause some ripples in the river, but the ripples disappear quickly. The impact of the pebble is lost in the larger process of the river.

And so, we keep tossing pebbles into rivers and become frustrated when even our successful efforts seem to break down over time, either with reversal of our gains or new attacks on our autonomy and choice.

We need to approach these issues in a different way, understanding that we live our lives within something much larger that is constantly affecting our efforts to change. We can fight that larger process or we can use it. But we can’t pretend or act like it doesn’t exist.